I held back for a moment, aware that I was toying with my father. I was savoring his attention — his desperation, really — knowing all too well that it was temporary. His chest rose and fell under the papery hospital sheets; a vein in his neck twitched in time to his heartbeat. I had the sudden conviction, feeling my own pulse quicken, that if I stared long enough at that vein it would explode.
“I’ve also got this.” I laid my notebook on the bed beside him.
“Show me.”
I flipped to the relevant page and held it up. Printed there, all in caps, was the very last line of the credits:
SPONSORED BY THE U.S. CHURCH OF SYNCHRONOLOGY
Orson glanced at it quickly, then pushed it away. It was obviously what he’d been expecting. I remember feeling vaguely disappointed.
“As soon as I get out of this organ-harvesting center,” he muttered, “we’re going to pay a visit to your aunties.”
Monday, 09:05 EST
This entry may turn your stomach, Mrs. Haven, but the possibility no longer worries me. I’m still writing for an audience of one, still bearing witness, as I’ve done since the beginning; but sometimes I wonder. Someone will read this, I’m certain of that. But my audience might not be you — or “you”—at all. It could even be the Timekeeper himself.
My relief at his disappearance didn’t last longer than a single sleep cycle. Once it registered that I was alone again — more alone, if possible, than I’d been before I found him — the old heaviness dropped down on me at once. The singularity was tightening its hold, taking advantage of my discouragement; but I knew the heaviness was just a symptom.
The cause of it was clear to me. I missed him.
This isn’t as perverse as it sounds, Mrs. Haven. I feel no sympathy for my great-uncle, let alone love. He’s a sociopath, a criminal, a monster — I have no doubt of that. But I was possessed of two ambitions before being banished to this place: (1) to arrive at a reckoning of my family’s crimes, by finishing this history; and (2) to reckon with them, perhaps even atone for them, by whatever sad, belated methods I could find. And I can no longer deny, Mrs. Haven — not now, having met him at last — that Waldemar holds the key to them both.
My strength gradually returned as I reviewed chapter XXI, and I began venturing, slowly and tentatively, back into the Archive. But not once in a half-dozen forays — two of them as far as my aunts’ bedroom — did I find the slightest trace of Waldemar. It was as though all evidence of him had been deliberately erased: no imprint on the bed, no bantering notes, no mnemonic triggers left out in the tunnels. I never would have thought a place so packed with junk could seem so empty. I had nothing but my history to keep me company, and my history wasn’t enough: not when the Timekeeper himself might be in the next room.
Finally, on what I’d resolved would be my very last pilgrimage to that claustrophobic chamber, I found him waiting for me on the bed.
He was sitting with his back against the headboard and his legs splayed in a V across the sheets, unpacking a grimy olive-colored satchel. Its contents seemed as random as anything out in the Archive: a bicycle pump, a length of wire, a tarnished old key, a handful of cherry pits in a cracked glass beaker. He took no notice of me until I cleared my throat.
“There you are, Waldy,” he said absently, holding the satchel upside-down and shaking it. “You have some questions for me, I imagine.”
I hadn’t been aware of having any questions. Nothing came to my mind.
“What was that, Nefflein?”
“Are we the same person?”
Again he seemed barely to hear me. He was more corporeal than when I’d seen him last, but also tighter-skinned — somehow inflated-seeming — as though his viscera and flesh were pressurized.
“Those things you did,” I said. “At the Äschenwald camp.”
He set the satchel aside. “What about them?”
I hesitated. “Am I like you?”
“What a curious question. In what sense do you mean?”
I did my best to hold his milky gaze. “If your theory is right — if chronological time is a hoax — then why should your guilt have been passed on to me? Why should I care what happened at Czas, or Vienna, or anywhere else? Why can’t I forget?”
I’d expected him to react with surprise, perhaps even anger; instead he cocked his head and grinned at me.
“I’ve been wondering what brought you here, Nefflein. Now I understand.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“The past is a torment to you, the present is grim, and the future — from what I can see — scares you out of your wits. Is it any wonder you’ve excused yourself from time?”
I opened my mouth and closed it.
“Here’s a piece of advice, Waldy. If you’re looking for causes—”
“I don’t want your advice. I want you to answer my question.”
“No need to shout!” He held up both his hands in mock surrender. “It’s important to keep in mind, first of all, that Äschenwald was a means to me only. The end—as you well know — was otherwise.” He shifted indolently on the bed. “If you’d had my reasons … then yes. Perhaps you might have acted as I did.”
He coughed twice — loudly and hackingly — into his fist, then waited to hear what I would ask him next.
“What were your reasons?” I said, as he’d known that I would.
“I can’t hear you, Nefflein. Come closer.”
I leaned forward. “Tell me what your reasons were.”
“For what?”
“For the Gottfriedens Protocols. For Äschenwald. For all of it.”
He replied without the slightest hesitation.
* * *
“In Budapest during the year of the famine I found myself, for a time, without a roof over my head, so I made my home in Népliget Park, in the company of some three hundred other starving wretches. People were eating the bark off the trees, digging holes in the frozen ground to pass the night in, slitting each other’s throats for a spoonful of cream. I did as the worst did — the ones who survived. But I was farther from myself than the others, at a greater remove from the man I’d once been, so I did more of it, Nefflein. And I did it better.
“My victims were Gypsies and Jews, for the most part — the reason was simply that they were nearby — and eventually my talents came to the attention of a certain order. The members of this order clothed me and fed me, and I accepted their patronage. I rose in their ranks, as a man of initiative will, and in time I was called to Berlin. I judged myself fortunate in this, as my patrons’ influence was waxing by the hour. I saw the future in them, Nefflein, and I was not disappointed.
“Gestures were required to consolidate my position: a measure of violence, as one might expect, but also a great deal of clerical work, for the most part pertaining to the propagation and diffusion of fear. The interests I represented during that time have come to have a reputation for viciousness, but the vast majority of them were timid men, conventional and unimaginative, and as such — given the tenor of the times — frightened within an inch of their lives. In such a field I found it easy to get on.
“I was under no illusion, when offered the directorship of the Äschenwald facility, that my scientific work was of importance to Berlin — but I realized the post would serve my needs. I’d been privileged with certain insights into the nature of time during my period of near-starvation in Népliget Park, and I’d waited almost twenty years to put them to the test. I saw the camp as a place of work: a research station, no more than that, but the only one I was likely to be granted. Compared with what I knew — what I’d known for two decades, more surely even than I knew my name — nothing else had weight or definition.